lunar3coming wrote:The fact of the matter is, things just make more sense in the Xseed version. This is not an opinion, this is a fact.
As MaroonChan said, not a fact. They may make more sense to you. They may not to be. Because of the difference, it's an opinion.
I do not see how you can accuse Alunissage of being against XSeed's work. True, she is defending WD. But her stake in the argument is NOT to claim that one version is better than another. It is to point out that the claims you make to assert your point are subjective, impressionistic, and do not hold up under analysis.
Alunissage wrote:The perspective I wish Lunar3coming would get is that a name isn't automatically faithful to and respectful of the original if it comes from XSEED and wildly off the mark if it comes from WD.
The translation styles differ. One is not inherently superior to the other, and there are good subjective reasons to prefer all three, but no good objective reason to do so. To every translator's credit, there weren't many mistakes of clarity in any version, and there weren't many places at all where a translator gave a translation that could have no reasonable justification.
I've enjoyed every translation I've seen. I have to give props to XSeed for making a faithful translation, but that's not to imply that WD's is any less faithful.
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Finally, I have a rather personal schtick with Lunar3coming's arguments, and I admit my bias beforehand - I don't think that "faithful" translation ought to be a desirable goal.[1] Intelligible, yes. Artful, yes. But I don't think it need reproduce the form or the exact meaning of the original in every spot. Every translation is a reinterpretation and an adaption. In addition to the similarities that must exist between a translation and its original, I look forward to seeing how the translators and editors emphasize different points and allow for the audience to see different possibilities in the story. But I don't care about literality. As Kizyr says in
his J2E differences of SSSC,
Kizyr wrote:Translation is an art, not a science, and so there are inevitably some changes in translated dialogue. Working Designs generally uses a two-step process, where the dialogue is first translated, and then interpreted to sound more natural in English.
Kizyr distinguishes between two steps: translation and interpretation. In these arguments, most of our issues are not really about translation (which is dubiously objective), but about interpretation (which is mostly subjective).
Because none of the translations suffers from a fault of "faithfulness," if that was important to you originally, all of the other judgments concerning quality fall back on interpretations that need have nothing to do with faithfulness to an original at all. I need not ever look at the Japanese to be able to judge these other qualities: is it culturally relevant? Do the names make sense to me? Am I moved when a particular plot point happens? Am I amused by the NPC dialogue? All of the criticisms of the WD translation I have seen harp on questions like these, with the issue of translation only being used as a proof of WD's inadequacy. For example, if people do not like the arbitrary and dated uses of humor, they dislike that first. I doubt that they start out particularly irked that the particular joke was not in the original, unless they know Japanese and feel that way about every translation. Translation becomes a talking point, attempting to lend authority to an argument about preference.
[1] I study a lot of premodern works where "translation" could be tight or loose depending on the author - faithfulness was not a concern. Psalm translations were a particular example, where an author like Mary Sidney (and her brother Philip) would actually write each psalm as a separate poetic form. The meanings of the psalms were basically translated, but in such a way that I cannot discount the considerable contributions that the differing poetic forms give to their beauty. Because we now think of the translator as inferior to the original author, my stance might be unthinkable for many of us, or interpreted as perversely preferring something derivative. All I mean to indicate, by this alternate bias, is that the faithfulness of translation has nothing to do with a translation's potential quality.